(19 June 2017 - 10:16 PM)
I'm in agreement with you Tony and I would hazzard a guess that Sony's own exclusives will be impressive enough that people wont be wishing they were on XB1X much like the X1's exclusives were technically as good as anything else.

(20 June 2017 - 06:37 AM)
I am quite impressed with the ps4 exclusives like days gone where there are tons of zombies on screen, and the game still maintains the frame rate and graphical fidelity. It is also no typical shooter where you endlessly just shoot down zombies. You have to utilise the environments and stealth to play. Story looks to be good as well.

(30 June 2017 - 01:36 AM)
The SNES classic .... only 20 somewhat games is a bit of a disappointment. The urge to buy a raspberry pi with a snes case is much higher then dropping 100 on something with corded controllers and 20 games

(09 July 2017 - 04:44 AM)
So Kyle / Direwolf: I just recently picked up Rocket League again after not playing since the first month or so. Still great fun, but I was wondering if you could suggest any You Tube tutorials or anything for new-ish players. Anything come to mind?

(05 August 2017 - 08:15 PM)
I beat the new Doom on my PS4 a few weeks back; really fun game. Once you beat it, make sure to watch the credits - they're actually one of the best cinematics I've seen and really kick ass (you'll know what I mean when you check them out).

(12 August 2017 - 04:09 AM)
I completed my 1st playthrough of hellblade earlier today. PS4 pro suports both a 60hz mode and a high res 30fps mode. The game is a flawed masterpiece IMO. Gorgeous visuals and excellent overall story and presentation let down by a sometimes painful combat system. The combat itself is not bad, but the targeting system is complete rubbish and some of the combat scenarios plain stink - i wont spoil anything. I'd describe the combat as being like Ryse Son of Rome minus the button prompts and dismemberment. Definately worth a look for the price.

No Man's Sky & broken game promises in general

No Man's Sky devs apparently claimed there would be much more to the game than they were actually able to deliver. This has led to complaining en masse by gamers, and caused Sony, Amazon, and Steam to offer refunds well beyond their usual refund limitations.

Here's a question: If a developer makes claims as to what's going to be in the game, but then then final product is less than that, (for either technical or budget constraints, the actual reason is irrelevant for this question,) what should be the accepted way to convey to the gamer community, "This is what the game is now"?

I never pre-order, so this question doesn't effect me, but I'm curious about what others think would be a valid method for when game promises can't be kept. There's no industry standard for handling this, and there can be a wide range of reasonable ways to handle it, (along with some questionable ways to handle it once the Marketing Dept. gets involved). This was quite the debate in the Youtube comments section, but I wanted a more intelligent/mature crowd's thoughts on it.

Failure is not important. How you overcome it is.

"Any day you don't die is a good day."
Quoted from a member of the bomb squad. I'm sure many soldiers feel that way too.

I own No Man's Sky (PS4 version) and I've had a lot of fun with the game. I followed its development casually so while the premise was right up my alley I didn't hang on every interview and video and still don't really know just what these promises were that were never delivered. From the early videos, it was my understanding that much of the game would be procedurally generated (check), I saw giant dinosaur aliens (check), space combat (check), being able to seamlessly go from space to the planet and back again (check, check and check), finding and repairing crashed ships (checks), being able to mine resources (check), being able to interact with aliens and buy and sell items (check and check), being able to learn alien languages (check), being able to catalog a planet's flora and fauna (check). The game was always promoted as a "chill" single player experience where the odds of meeting other players were infinitesmal at best. Graphically it looks fine to me and very comparable to the early videos I saw.

As an older gamer (51) it took me about 15 minutes of playing to see that No Man's Sky was little more than a 1980s PC game like the original Elite with updated graphics. Those games of that era were open-ended, didn't hold your hands at all, and really had no endgame to them. The open-ended nature and isolation in the game are major pluses to me and I am amazed that so many players still don't understand what a simple concept Hello Games was actually going for.

I also think anyone who played the game for more than 10 hours and then demanded their money back is just a spoiled, entitled gamer. A quick perusal of the net and a couple of hours of gameplay is all any reasonable person would have needed to see just what this game has to offer, even if they did pre-order it. It seems most gamers (and reviewers for that matter) automatically diss any game that doesn't hold the player by the hand or offer 10 zillion multi-player options. There are plenty of other games for that; this one is aiming for a very different experience.

Maybe Hello Games did plan to add more features that either were not possible given hardware limitations or time constraints. And Sony has always been notorious for hyping their games to death. In spite of that, I got everything I was expecting from the game and feel I easily got my money's worth.

My only gripe was that the game did ship with a lot of bugs and it crashed more on me in the first week that all the other console games I've ever owned combined. That has been largely fixed now and it has not crashed on me in the past several days but it was a little disconcerting nonetheless.

So I for one do not understand all the hate the game got and regardless of what was promised, I think there is enough there to justify the price and I think it's an amazing accomplishment considering how small the development team was. There are plenty of "A" list games I paid $60 or more for that didn't get as much playtime as this.

What I heard was it was very buggy and there was actually no multiplayer proved by a couple people going to the same spot on the same planet and not seeing each other. I forget if they were Youtubers or who they were, but they were well known. That's the premise for the refund. The video I watched that inspired my question was "the know" on Youtube. They talked about it and the refunds.

I really don't care so much about No Man's Sky so much as the concept in general of a dev not delivering features they said they would and how they should address that so people don't feel defrauded. I think that's a curious collision of marketing hype vs the morality of not deceiving customers vs understanding that new games aren't always as described and should we treat games differently than physical products and features promised just because games fail to live up to the hype so often?

If devs all worded it as what they hope it ends up as, like "What we want to have is..., What we aim to do is..." and not use phrases of certainty like "This game will have..." then I think this would be a total non-issue. I don't follow games in development, but given the brew-ha-ha this caused, I'm assuming they said the game "would have" and not "we want it to have".

Failure is not important. How you overcome it is.

"Any day you don't die is a good day."
Quoted from a member of the bomb squad. I'm sure many soldiers feel that way too.

Regarding Noman's Sky, I don't have anything to add. I am in full agreement with Tony's post and share the perspective that alot of the complainers are nasty entitled whiners. I suspect alot of people who don't typically play this kind of game jumped on the hype train and either pre-ordered or bought the game day one. They could have waited on reviews, checked out gameplay footage, read other people impressions before buying day one, but they didn't. Tough luck!

Considering the small team that worked on this game, I have to say I am really impressed with what they accomplished. It was buggy at launch, the main gameplay loop is a tedious IMHO and the price point was a bit higher than where I felt it should have been. BUT the end product is an ambitious, niche Indie title - it never looked anything more than that and I never expected more than that.

@GH regarding the industry as a whole. There are many ways things could improve and many practices I consider anti-consumer. I'll touch on some of that in another post as I've ran out of time

The only gripe would be the multiplayer part where the youtubers did not see each other... that's misleading. I didn't think the final product was something misleading like Gearbox had done with Aliens and Brothers in Arms in the past...

I don't understand why people feel the need to buy day one... always wait a few weeks to see how it pans out in the end. Buyer beware!